Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

sherwood.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 267 posts

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#171

Post by superjose »

bjourne wrote: post #164
mattmanser wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what we mean when we say that phrase. They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming. From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.

Eternal September was never a problem for SO, it was an asset. Duplicate questions was never a problem for those asking or answering questions (I did both), only for a relatively small group of loudmouthed moderators. Now they hardly have any dupes to worry about but they also have no content to moderate!

The best was when the duplicated question was ranked higher on Google haha

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#172

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

nitwit005 wrote: post #165
crazygringo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of documentation, and plenty of code that the AI can read itself. E.g. if a library has a bug that has a common workaround, it can learn that from open source code using the library that uses the workaround.

That assumes there is documentation or examples. A big reason Stack Overflow took off was people struggling with things like the Android API documentation. Some of those discussions made people go figure out how to do it, and then post it as an answer. The knowledge didn't exist anywhere until they did.

It might make sense for AI companies to throw agents at new technologies to trial-and-error their way to internal documentation which they then provide to their models. On the other hand, the people making tomorrow's APIs have LLMs too and that makes documentation ~free. Hallucinations could still bring you back to the first hand, though.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#173

Post by crispyambulance »

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times.

Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others.

Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does not excuse treating people like shit for asking the "wrong" question. The level of smugness and the withering dismissals I saw on there just made me cringe-- I'm looking at you Hans Passant!

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#174

Post by oh_my_goodness »

mattmanser wrote: post #154
andrekandre wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a.k.a enshitification

That's not what we mean when we say that phrase. They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming. From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.

"We"?

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#175

Post by ruebencoleslaw »

echoangle wrote: post #147
dorgo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm, I got rid of WhatsApp the day it was sold to Facebook and never touched it since. I don't think anything in the app changed that day.

You think a significant number of people started boycotting SO after the sale?

I'd disagree that the site wasn't changing. I think they were already trying to sideline job portal possibilities because it wasn't making a high enough worth calculation compared to entirely unrealized estimates. However my reaction to changes was forgiving for the old firm while feeling transactional was basically doom to my using the site as I didn't really need anything from interactions.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#176

Post by aucisson_masque »

> Large language models want data about coding problems and how to solve them. Stack Overflow has a big digital warehouse full of that, but it’s increasingly aging, as queries move into private chat windows with LLM models.

What are the llm going to feed on when coding languages change and there isn't anymore stackoverflow or these kind of forum ?

Surely it can read the documentation but it's not enough, you need data from real humans figuring stuffs out.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#177

Post by Bender »

conradfr wrote: post #5

Call me crazy but sometimes I still find a better solution on StackOverflow than what Claude Code insists to do. I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.

I'm not sure we're better off without SO in the long run.

You're right but that site has been sputtering culturally for some time. I put a lot of effort into editing questions and answers on ServerFault (part of SO) but I feel that time was wasted. I think they knew for a while they just wanted to sell it and just stopped caring. A number of editors were allowed to be jerks for too long and it went to their heads. I wish I could take back all that effort.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#178

Post by aucisson_masque »

jmyeet wrote: post #151
hintymad wrote: post #6

Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?

Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about too. LLMs have basically profited from "stealing" (arguably) user-generated content from a time when there were no LLMs. In the LLM era there won't be a new Stack Overflow to train LLMs on going forward. We're getting closer to Dead Internet Theory too where a lot of accounts, particularly on Twitter, are just LLMs. I imagine it's a huge problem on Reddit too. Just peo…

It's been studied,LLM that feed on its own data regress and it becomes very bad after a few generations.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#179

Post by kstrauser »

crispyambulance wrote: post #173

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times. Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others. Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does no…

"How do I do this thing in Django 6?"

Closed: duplicate of question 1234, "How do I do some vaguely related thing in Django 1.3?", August 2011

The mods there sucked all the joy out of interacting with the site. If you run a site with moderators, let this be a reminder to keep them reined in lest they Stack Overflow it.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#180

Post by kstrauser »

oh_my_goodness wrote: post #174
mattmanser wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what we mean when we say that phrase. They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming. From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.

"We"?

Yes. There's a whole book explaining what enshittification means, and it's not merely "gets worse".
Post reply on HN